Displacement

Today Robert and I walked around a harbor under sunshine. I went uncovered because our friend said that “in this part of town, are you kidding, no one would care”. The wind rippled the short, sparse fur on my head, making it flap like flags, and I realized I’d never felt the wind before, not on my head, not really,  And the sun warmed my head so that I remembered it was finding the sun for the first time since its infancy, and Robert reached down to his waist for that faithful, colored  bandana that is always there, like he is always there, and in one smooth motion, he offered it for yet another new use: to protect a  newly exposed skull from burning. And around us stepped, like a flock of swans drawn to the water, five silent, elegant Asian women in eight shades of black, holding out cameras to the water like long necks.

With the red cells robbed from my body by chemicals, so that my breath is shortened of oxygen, I find the short walk long, and walk slowly, contented just to listen, as our friend explains the facts of gentrification to us, how a neighborhood can gradually empty of its population to make way for the new ones who better fit the prices. For you see, the Games are coming to this Harbor, and a new train hub, and the housing prices have tripled, and there in less than 2% occupancy space left to rent anywhere near this swan-graced place, Toronto’s new bedroom. And the faces we see are the face-lift of the Harbor, so that the aging process is working backwards. But where do the people go? The ones who do not look like swans and * once owned this harbor walk that I might not * have taken with them around me? Where do they go? And do we follow them? We who have the choice to go or stay when they do not? My friend who cares for them asks these questions.

And I realize I’m not the only one displaced here. No, it’s not just individuals that get picked up by their own personal tornadoes and moved by circumstances to new places. No, sometimes there are slow, invisible, grinding tornadoes that pick up entire populations and move them around like sand. There are the war refugees like my South Sudanese friend, fleeing across borders to escape death, there are my Mixtec friends drifting across the face of America in search of work and a new life for loved ones left behind in misty mountain villages, and there are Honduran and Nicaraguan and Salvadorian children riding a train called The Beast, which makes its way up Mexico’s back to a Texan border, maybe a refugee camp, if they get that far. And their displacement is so much more than mine. And what do we do in the face of such big forces?

We kid ourselves, all of us, if we think we have solid ground beneath our feet. The tornado of age at least besets us. We are all moving. It’s just that some of us are allowed to feel it in our scalp and in our breath on gentle walks, while others, less fortunate, ride trains. And where do they go? And do we follow them? We who have the choice to go or stay when they do not? Or do we think we live, safe as houses, where there are no tornadoes?